Sir, - Having had the privilege of spending most of summer 1935 as Jim Larkin's guest in the Dublin house he shared with his sister, emerging as a life long Larkinite, socialist, and of chairing the committee which nominated him as Dublin Labour candidate for the Dail in 1943 and went on to secure his election, let me congratulate you on your commemorative articles on our greatest political leader this century, by Professor Larkin and my friend Des Geraghty.
My three most lasting memories of Larkin are his passionate conviction that the peoples of the world can and, if need be, must grip hands above the heads and behind the backs of governments to guarantee world peace, his faith that the people would one day be able to replace a society based on cut throat competition by one developed through the co operative effort of all citizens for the good of all, and his extraordinary erudition. I have known many avid readers, but none so avid, or so critical, as he. Just before he died he asked me for a loan of books by Halldor Laxness, the left wing Icelandic author who years later won the Nobel Literature Prize, whose, importance he had already spotted.
I can never forget his son, Jim Junior, quoting to a group of grief stricken strugglers through the greatest blizzard of the century in Jim's funeral procession, his father's favourite lines of verse:
Mourn not the dead that in the cold earth lie,
Dust into dust as all men must,
But rather mourn the apathetic throng,
The cowed and meek
Who know the world's great anguish and its wrong,
And dare not speak.
-Yours, etc.,
Grosvenor Terrace,
Dalkey,
Co Dublin.